Jim Miller on Politics

Pseudo-Random Thoughts

The British Election Declaration Ceremonies: If you watch British
election returns, as I was doing almost two weeks ago, you'll see a lot of declaration ceremonies. This one,
from the 2010 general election, will give you an idea of what they look like.

A returning officer, or often an acting
returning officer, reads the vote totals while
the candidates stand facing a small crowd. (As you probably noticed, almost all of the candidates
are wearing rosettes that identify their party, blue for Conservatives, red for Labour, and so on.)

The winner shakes hands with the other candidates, makes a brief acceptance speech, and
that's it. It's about as simple as a ceremony can be, even in a democracy.

Simple, but at least for me, very touching.

I don't see any way of introducing similar ceremonies here, but if there was I would be in favor of
doing so.

(As far as I know, the candidates come to these ceremonies because it is customary, not because it is
legally required.)

Snowpocalypse In The Cascades: We've had a cold, wet spring in
this area, which produces unhappy people in the lowlands — and piles and piles of snow in the
Cascades.

Yes, it is odd that a British paper would publish the best set of snow pictures that I've seen, especially
considering that they come from Washington state's Department of Transportation, but there they are.
(Our local journalists are, with a few honorable exceptions, not much interested in our rural
areas.)

But it is not odd that the Daily Mail got the story a little bit wrong. Most likely, the North
Cascades highway has had 75 feet of snow fall since the beginning of winter, not 75 feet of
accumulation.

(I hope to have some snow pictures of my own to show you soon. Thursday is supposed to be
sunny, and I am planning to drive down to Mt. Rainier to ski a little bit, and to take a lot of
pictures. According to their phone message, they have had 890 inches of snow since last July,
and currently have 224 inches on the ground.

Both are above average for this time of year; neither is close to a record.)

Two More Unreasonable Economists: As you may recall, I was amused
by Ruth Marcus's claim that no "reasonable" economist thought
that Obama's stimulus package hurt the economy, short term. With just a brief search, I found
an economist, who looks reasonable to me, who thought that it did.

Now, economists Timothy Conley of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State have come up with an
estimate of how much the stimulus
hurt the economy.

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local
government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and
local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls
and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of
destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business
services. This suggests the possibility that, in absence of the ARRA, many government workers
(on average relatively well-educated) would have found private-sector employment had their jobs not
been saved.

(ARRA = American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.)

Before anyone gets too excited about that result, I should add that many other economists found that
the stimulus package created jobs, net. (Conley and Dupor give brief descriptions of a number of
such studies in section 5 of their paper.)

So no one should consider the Conley/Dupor paper proof that the stimulus package hurt
employment, short term. But, unlike the other studies, it does explain why employment
growth was so anemic during the stimulus.

(One finding that is likely to hold up: Conley and Dupor found that the states used money
intended for highway construction to balance their budgets, not to speed up new construction.
For example, Texas received $700 million for highways, but reduced their highway
capital budget from $3.38 billion in 2009 to $2.82 billion in 2010.

In general, states used highway money, not to build or repair highways, but to make up for shortfalls in tax
collections, and increases in Medicaid spending.)

Today, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade
cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to
impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany's University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that
farmers producing for the fair-trade market "are more often found below the absolute poverty line
than conventional producers.

"Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become
poorer relative to conventional producers."

Lawrence Solomon, who is president of the Green Beanery, a Toronto roaster and coffee shop, explains
why in the rest of the piece.

The people who set up these programs mostly mean well — but are not as diligent at
checking the results of their programs as they ought to be.

U.S. automakers are having a banner year in 2011. Sales are up and so are profits.
And they're doing it without much help from the city of San Francisco.

On April 29, the last domestic car dealership within city limits, San Francisco Ford Lincoln, closed its
showroom doors and began winding down its repair and service operations, according to the San
Francisco Chronicle. Business had fallen off so much over the past few years that Ford
Motor Co. itself had taken over the operation from its previous owner, but even support from the
mother ship couldn't keep it afloat.

And, I suspect, won't buy many other American products.

Why not? A combination of snobbery and ignorance, I suspect. (And maybe a touch of
the anti-Americanism so common on the left.)

(This year is a better year than 2009 and 2010, but I doubt that many automakers would call it
a "banner" year.)

Worth Reading: Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever explains why he
needs help on illegal immigration from the federal government, not
obstruction.

There is no river between Arizona and Mexico to create a natural obstacle to illegal immigration, drug
trafficking and human smuggling, and our county is a major corridor for all these. At best,
illegal aliens and smugglers trespass, damage ranchers' land, steal water and food and start
fires. At worst, people who have come here hoping for freedom and opportunity are raped or
abandoned by smugglers and left to die in the desert.

Nor are the migrants the only victims. Just over a year ago, while officials at the Department
of Homeland Security were declaring they had secured "operational control" of most of the southern
Arizona border, my friend Robert N. Krentz Jr., a local rancher, was murdered, most likely by drug
smugglers.

The people of Cochise County support the state's immigration law because we want this violence to
end. Understandably, we get frustrated and disheartened when the White House, which has failed
to secure the border for generations, sues us for trying to fill the legal vacuum.

During the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson was admiring all the academic types that John Kennedy had brought into
his adminstration. Speaker Sam Rayburn, a wiser man, replied with
this:

They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them
had ever run for sheriff.

Sheriffs may not be right about everything, but they are in direct touch with many problems, in ways that
few other elected officials are.

Digital TV, President Bush, And Prime Minister Gillard: The United
States handled the transition to digital TV about as well as one could expect. Taxpayers subsidized
the purchase of converter boxes
for those who wanted to keep their analog TV sets, but did not, in most places, help with the
installation. Those who couldn't handle the simple installation almost all had friends or
relatives who could.

When it became obvious that many people had missed the almost endless public service announcements on
the transition, the government delayed the transition and extended the time for the converter box rebate
cards.

On the whole, I thought that the transition went about as well as one could expect, in a nation as large and
diverse as this one.

It is hard to know how much credit President Bush deserves for the relatively smooth transition,
but we can be certain that he would have been blamed if it had gone badly.

COMPANIES being paid $350 a time to install set-top boxes for pensioners are offering sub-contractors
the work for as little as $84.

Tender documents show the Government is making lavish incentive payments for quick installations under
the controversial scheme to give all pensioners access to digital television. But Victorian-based
Skybridge, one of two companies which have so far won the bulk of the installation work, has offered
businesses in western NSW just $84.

The company is linked to another operation set up under a similar name in 2009 to install home insulation
under the Government's bungled pink batts scheme.

Just from that account, you can see some of the mistakes that Gillard's Labor government is making.
They are assuming that pensioners need help and that it must come from the government. They
are paying for work that almost all Australians, pensioners or not, could do themselves. And they
are awarding government work to a company that failed badly in earlier work. (The insulation
installations sometimes caused house fires.)

By way of Tim Blair,
who has some nasty, and very funny, things to say about the Australian government's
blunders.

"Demagoguery 101" Last year, the Seattle Timesdropped
Charles Krauthammer from their list of columnists. It isn't hard to understand why; the editorial
board did not like reading Krauthammer columns like
this one.

The El Paso speech is notable not for breaking any new ground on immigration but for perfectly
illustrating Obama's political style: the professorial, almost therapeutic, invitation to civil discourse,
wrapped around the basest of rhetorical devices — charges of malice compounded with
accusations of bad faith. "They'll never be satisfied," said Obama about border control.
"And I understand that. That's politics."

How understanding. The other side plays "politics," Obama acts in the public interest.
Their eyes are on poll numbers, political power, the next election; Obama's rest fixedly on the little
children.

The board did not like reading those columns because, I suspect, they knew that what Krauthammer
writes is — usually — true. They would rather not read Krauthammer's
critiques of President Obama, because those critiques force supporters to reconsider their support.
(Or, perhaps, force them to support, or at least excuse, his demagoguery.)

Krauthammer could have made his case even stronger by citing Mark Salter's
experience.
Salter blames Obama for helping block immigration reform. Obama, Salter
says, could never be satisfied; he wanted the issue, not reforms.

It is time for Obama to grow up a little, to give up these childish insults, these nasty attacks on the
motives of those who disagree with him. Whether he likes it or not, he will have to work with
Republicans during this year and next. And, even if he is re-elected in 2012, it is likely that
the Republicans will control one or both houses of Congress during the next four years.

His supporters — including the Seattle Times editorial board — should
be the first to insist that Obama grow up a little. If they want him to succeed as president, they
should tell him to put the country's best interests ahead of immediate political gains, and they should
stop tolerating the distortions, exaggerations, and sometimes outright falsehoods that he uses in so
many of his speeches.

If, that is, his supporters think that the country's interests are more important than short-term
gains for the left wing of the Democratic party.

US officials have revealed that Osama bin Laden's diaries contain the rather startling conclusion that
he didn't think Vice President Joe Biden was worth bumping off (hat tip: a tweet from my New York
colleague Jon Swaine).

(Toby Harnden doubts that they would have insulted Dick Cheney in the same way.)

Ruth Marcus Gave Me A Challenge: While criticizing John Boehner,
the Washington Post columnist made
this claim:

Reasonable economists can disagree about the effectiveness of the stimulus spending and whether it
was worth the drag of the additional debt, but no reasonable economist argues that it hurt the economy
in the short term.

(Emphasis added.)

And I accepted her challenge, because economists are a notably diverse group, unlike our "mainstream"
journalists. To refute that last line, all I have to do is find is one reasonable economist
who thinks the stimulus hurt the economy, short term. A brief search on the net turned up
Eugene F. Fama,
"Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business".
He certainly sounds reasonable to me, though Marcus may disagree.

(Professor Gregory Mankiw could probably turn up half a dozen for her, without using the net.)

There are larger problems with her column, but those will have to wait for later post(s).

The lesson of all this is that one's sense of possibilities — and proprieties — is shaped by
what we know, and often do not know, about history. The regnant ideology within the Obama
administration and among congressional Democrats is reactionary liberalism, the conviction that whatever
government programs exist should forever exist because they always have existed. That is, as baby
boomers, in their narcissism — or perhaps solipsism; or both — understand "always."

Will is unlikely to have much success with these students. Unfortunately for all of us.

It is astonishing to see how often Obama makes horrible mistakes in history, and disturbing to see how
often he makes absurd claims about his political opponents' plans. It is disgusting to see how often
he gets away with both.

NEWSBUSTERS: Starting with the title - the term "gangster goverment," I don't want to call it
hyperbole, obviously it's not, but it's a very inflammatory term, almost.

FREDDOSO: I prefer provocative. But I also think it's very descriptive. You go
back to the first use of that term in reference to the obama administration by our own Michael Barone
here, who was kind enough to write the forward to the book, that incident, which he called an episode
of gangster government, saw the pinstriped thugs of Obama's Treasury Department going to the secured
creditors of Chrysler, who were owed money by the company, who should have been first in line, in any
real bankruptcy proceeding, to collect, and say to them, "we're taking your property away, we're giving
it away to a politically favored labor union, and if you resist us, we're going to smear and vilify you
using the White House as our platform." Which Obama did. On April, 30, 2009, he gave
the now-famous speech in which he attacked these pension funds - the indiana state highway fund and the
other folks, the few secured creditors who still stood in his way, and didn't go into the night
quietly. In the mean time, he had already bought off all off all of the big banks and others who
were involved in that, who had secured obligations with chrysler, because they were actually getting
more money form tarp than they ever would've gotten from a Chrysler bankruptcy or money back on
what they had leant Chrysler.

So what you had here was massive government overreach in a number of places at once. Not
all of which, by the way, were Obama's fault. Not all of those overreaches. We had
President Bush destroying capitalism in oder to save it, in roughly his own words. Obama,
though, was given a blank check by what Bush did at the end of his term. The TARP bill was
used as a justification for bailing out automakers, manipulating bankruptcies, taking majority ownership
in GM, which is unprecedented, to my knowledge. Obama was basically given a blank check
by Bush, and being the Chicago politician he is, has made full use of that power. He has
ruthlessly exploited the brokenness of our system in a way that only a true Chicago politician could.

(Quibble: There are politicians in other cities who can be just as ruthless as Chicago
politicians, but I know what he means.)

I plan to buy the book soon; you should at least read the entire interview — especially if you
support Obama.

(Freddoso wrote the best book on Barack Obama that I've read so far,
The Case Against Barack Obama.
Freddoso is a careful reporter. I took the time to check a number of his footnotes in the
book, and didn't find a single mistake — and I like to think that I am fairly good at finding mistakes
in political books.)

"It's ironic to pick out those particular lyrics about this particular artist when in fact he's known as
a socially conscious hip hop artist or rapper who, in fact, has done a lot of good things," offered
Carney. "You can oppose some of what he's done and appreciate some of the other things
he's done."

For instance? For instance, working with
children.
A skeptic might wonder just what Common is teaching those children. And someone who knows
even a little history will remember that nearly every vile movement has had children's auxiliaries.

(Common has traditional views on some subjects. For instance, he's against race mixing.
A white Republican who agreed with him would be called a racist by everyone in the Obama
adminstration.

Older readers will probably have guessed that I am repeating the excuse often used for Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini, that at least he made
the trains run on time. Actually
he didn't, but many, in Italy and
elsewhere, believed that he had.)

Lifeguards In Newport Beach Do Very Well: If, as Jack Wu
explains, they are full
time. (Oddly, the full-time lifeguards leave most of the life guarding to hourly, part-time
lifeguards.)

And the retired full-time lifeguards do even better.

Ooohhh . . . forgot to mention their juicy pensions didn't I?

OK, consider that two recently retired Lifeguards now receive in excess of $100K a year in pensions
plus medical. One guard recently retired at age 51 to receive $108,000 a year, plus medical.

Newport Beach can probably
afford this level of
compensation, but not many other places can. As those other places are beginning to
discover.

(Unfortunately for our late night comedians, the Newport Beach lifeguards aren't the
Baywatch crew. Erika Eleniak, Pamela
Anderson, and all the others worked for Los Angeles County, not Newport Beach.)

Why The Rush To Reveal The Bin Laden Raid? Jonah Goldberg makes
the same point I did in
this post, but supports it with some anonymous experts and a
metaphor that even President Obama should be able to understand.

For a week people have been asking, "Why won't the president release Osama bin Laden's photo?"
That's the wrong question. We should be asking, "Why was Barack Obama in such a hurry to tell us
bin Laden was dead?"
. . .
I'm no expert on such matters -- though I've talked to several about this -- but even a casual World War
II buff can understand that the shelf life of actionable intelligence would be extended if we hadn't told
the whole world, and al-Qaeda in particular, that we had it [the "treasure trove" of seized
materials].

It's a bit like racing to the microphones to announce you've stolen the other team's playbook even before
you've had a chance to use the information in the big game.

You want to keep your enemies guessing as long as possible. Even a day or two might have
helped.

(For an example of how we sometimes kept secrets during World War II, see the capture of the
U-505.)

Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter? You may have thought that our 16th
president had enough to do, what with the Civil War and all, so that he had no time for a secret
life. But a
movie,
due to be released next year, challenges that idea:

. . . [T]he cast and crew of the movie, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," are scrambling to deliver
a summer blockbuster. It is set for release, in 3-D, by 20th Century Fox in June of
next year.

The filmmakers are also creating one of the more startling historical revisions in movie memory.
Their Lincoln, you see, is a devoted slayer of the undead.

According to the article, the producers are trying to make the movie as historically accurate as possible,
except for that little bit about vampires. (If you accept that bit, you will find John
Wilkes Booth easier to understand.)

This updated version was constructed to show the temporary effects of the tax credits, but there is much else
we can learn from the graph. Note that house prices were falling from the late 1890s until
about 1930, probably because of innovations, and the benefits of mass production.

Note also that house prices were surprisingly stable from 1946 until 1997. I would guess that what
was happening during that period was that innovation and increasing regulation roughly balanced each
other; builders and suppliers found ways to make houses cheaper, and political leaders and bureaucrats found
ways to make them more expensive. (One way to check that guess would be to explore the
trends in house prices in markets that are more or less regulated.)

In my semi-informed opinion, we could have falling house prices, long term, if we were to
reduce housing regulations. In many areas that would be politically impossible, but not
all.

Again, in my semi-informed opinion, one of the causes of the housing bubble was excessive regulation
that it made it expensive to build new houses. That helps explain why the increases in
house prices varied so widely from state to state, and city to city.

Credits: The data in the graph come, mostly, from Shiller's book,
Irrational Exuberance.
The graph was originally constructed by the New York Times. It has been
updated several times by Steve Barry and published at
The Big Picture.

Barry Ritholtz published the latest version
here;
Megan McArdle uses the chart to criticize the Obama administration's tax credits
here
— though, for some reason, she never mentions Obama by name.

Mitch Daniels Is A Smart Fellow: Smart enough so that he once
"fired" Donald Trump.

Though it may be hard to believe given his mild-mannered demeanor, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is the
only potential Republican presidential candidate who can claim to have fired Donald Trump. Back
in 2005, Daniels effectively blocked Trump's attempt to build a casino in the town of French Lick, Ind.

And was right to do so.

(Daniels is my first choice for a Republican presidential candidate. I'll have more to say about
why I like him in later posts.)

Different Administrations, Different Tastes: John F. Kennedy asked
Robert Frost to read a poem at his
inauguration ceremony.

Michelle Obama has, shall we say, different tastes than Kennedy did. She's asked rapper
Common to perform at the
White House. He is not the poet I would choose, if I were looking for someone to
bring us together.

First Lady Michelle Obama has scheduled a poetry evening for Wednesday, and she's invited several
poets, including a successful Chicago poet and rapper, Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA "Common."
However, Lynn is quite controversial, in part because his poetry includes threats to shoot police and
at least one passage calling for the "burn[ing]" of then-President George W. Bush.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush
after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and
retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of
Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed,
Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

The Pakistanis are quite good at vociferous protests, so there wasn't any reason to think they couldn't
hold up their end of the deal.

So the usual corrective institutions aren't functioning. If no one tells the emperor and his courtiers
that they are under-dressed, such people are going to keep peeling off clothes confident of the fact that
nobody (or at least anyone who counts) will tell them that they are naked. With so much insulation,
they don't feel the chill.
. . .
If Sarah Palin says something stupid, a hundred sources will ridicule her and she won't make the same
mistake again. If Barack Obama says something stupid, he won't learn anything because of the
silence of the fans.

Example: President Obama's Cairo speech, his much-touted outreach to the Muslim world, had
several historical errors in it. As I recall, one or two of them were bad enough so that even I
would have spotted them. If anyone in our "mainstream" media noticed those mistakes, they
weren't bothered by them.

(There are, I am sure, people in the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA who could
have found and corrected the mistakes in the Cairo speech. There are university historians
who would have been glad to vet the speech for Obama. Apparently, he didn't ask any of these
people for help.)

Congratulations To Meryl Yourish: On ten years of
productive blogging.

Productive, and often, for me, instructive.

And I should mention, as I have before, that she was generous in helping me get started blogging.
(She's even been nice enough to laugh at some of my jokes, though I think she may have
missed this one.) I suspect that she has helped
others in the same way, and many others, in other ways, during the last ten years.

(Yes, I'm late — but I have had two elections, and the bin Laden raid to cover in the last few
weeks.)

Uninhabitable: Bin Laden's living quarters resembled a poorly-run care home rather than the nerve
centre of the world's most wanted terrorist

That dirt and disorder is of no great importance, but it does puzzle me. After all, none of the
wives had demanding careers that kept them outside the home, so they had plenty of time to keep the
place up, if they wanted to.

(Perhaps jealousy, an almost inevitable problem with polygamous relationships, kept the wives from even
minimal cooperation. Or maybe all three of the wives viewed themselves as prisoners —
understandably — and did no more than the absolute minimum.)

They Told Me That If I Voted For John McCain Fat Cats Would Get
Fatter. And they were
right.

Chief executives at the biggest U.S. companies saw their pay jump sharply in 2010, as boards rewarded
them for strong profit and share-price growth with bigger bonuses and stock grants.
The median value of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive awards for CEOs of 350 major companies
surged 11% to $9.3 million, according to a study of proxy statements conducted for The Wall Street
Journal by management consultancy Hay Group.

Boat On Building: One more tsunami disaster
picture.
The boat looks as if it had been placed, by a careful crane operator, on top of that building.

(The article, on the use of battery-electric cars after the disaster, is mildly interesting, though I have
doubts about its balance. But they made a mistake posing the car in front of that interesting
background.)

Wanted Dead Or Dead: Toby Harnden calls attention to a change in
American policy:

President Bush:

Throughout the Bush administration, the method of choice for dealing with senior al-Qaeda operatives
was to track them down, capture them and transport them to a CIA secret prison, known as a
"black site". Some were subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding,
widely regarded as torture.

Terrorists who would have been captured under Mr Bush so that every last morsel of information could
be wrung out of them have been sent straight to their maker under Mr Obama.

Most — but not all — leftists are fine with this change in policy. Most leftists believe
that it is very wrong to dunk a terorist in water, but that it is okay to shoot the same man, without holding
a trial first.

Whatever you may think of that ethical position, it is obvious that the Obama policy has practical
disadvantages. It is almost always better to capture a terrorist than kill him, because you can,
in time, almost always get him to reveal some secrets.

(FWIW: Harnden quotes an unidentified Navy Seal saying that it would have been easier
to capture bin Laden than to kill him.)